The Detroit show, and the only car that matters

DanNeil

The VL Destino: Where Karma meets Corvette.

One night in July, Gilbert Villarreal and three of his engineers tucked in to a dinner at On the Border restaurant in Auburn Hills, Mich. Villarreal’s company had landed a contract to build a small fleet of plug-in hybrid commercial vans, but production was imperiled by the looming bankruptcy of battery maker A123, in Livonia, Mich. Where were they going to get the batteries?

The car that stole the show

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The VL Destino marries a Corvette engine to the body of a Fisker Karma sedan. Dan Neil explains why this wildcat of a car stole the Detroit Auto Show.

Then someone wondered aloud: What are those guys over at Fisker going to do? Like Villarreal’s plug-in utility van, the sleek, six-figure Fisker Karma—an electric sedan-coupe built in Finland by Henrik Fisker, the former design chief at BMW and Aston Martin—has at its core a whopping 20-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack sourced from A123. The Karma’s troubles were well known: overdrawn, overpromised, overweight. The company had to recall hundreds of cars to patch a fault in the A123 battery.

One of the engineers mused: Somebody at Fisker should just drop a Corvette ZR1 engine in the Karma and be done with it.

Villarreal thought: I know how to do that.

What came next blows my mind. It is such a wonderful tale of resourcefulness, common sense, blowtorch engineering and the love of the automobile. Villarreal called his flying buddy and partner in a watchmaking venture, former GM executive and famed car guy Bob Lutz, to ask if he could get Fisker’s consent to such a conversion. At a lunch meeting in Los Angeles in July, Fisker agreed to sell 20 Karma “gliders” (cars without powertrains); his only condition was that the finished cars be visually distinct from the EV Karma.

A Corvette powerplant was dropped into the Fisker Karma body, which had housed an electric motor.

And that is how the world came by the VL Destino, a very bad Karma indeed, with the supercharged, 638-horsepower Corvette engine shoved, but barely, under a new, Vette-like hood bulge.

Also, the Karma’s notorious mustache-like front was trimmed with a new fascia, drawn by none other than Lutz himself, on cellophane, laid over a lovely artist’s rendering that had been sent to him for approval.

The Destino debuted at this week’s Detroit auto show, not on the main floor at Cobo Hall but in a modest two-car display out in the lobby, far from the global spotlight. Lutz, 80, who retired as vice chairman of General Motors
GM, -1.25%
three years ago, was his usual undiminished self.

“People say, ‘Well, it looks like a Maserati,’ and I say, ‘And your point is?’ “

The back story for the VL Automotive (Villarreal and Lutz) effort is a lush jungle of ironies. You have Bob Lutz, a cigar-smoking ex-Marine aviator known in the car world as Maximum Bob, the climate-change denier who championed the GM bailout and the Chevrolet Volt; and Fisker, the Anaheim, Calif.-based luxury-EV auto maker founded by Henrik Fisker, whose company’s federal loan guarantees hang in the balance as it struggles with bad press and bad luck (300 Karmas were destroyed at New Jersey’s Port Newark during superstorm Sandy). There’s enough ashes to dine on for everyone.

Because of its direct kinship, the Destino can piggyback on the Corvette’s emissions certification as well as the Karma’s crash-testing data, since none of the car’s load-path structure has been altered.

But for the moment, let’s contemplate the machine. Here you have to use your imagination, because the two prototypes shown were pretty rough. None of the Karma’s instrument software, the graphical flowcharts and gauges for the EV range and power depletion, has been recoded. Because the Destino is lighter by at least 1,100 pounds (no massive battery pack), its ride height and suspension kinematics will have to be completely recalibrated, if the pieces themselves do not require remanufacturing.

Virtual aerodynamics testing, systems integration, graphics. There’s plenty of work to be done. And yet, a lot is already behind them. Because of its direct kinship, the Destino can piggyback on the Corvette’s emissions certification as well as the Karma’s crash-testing data, since none of the car’s load-path structure has been altered. “And if they ask us to crash one, we’ll crash one,” said Lutz.

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